Director, Stephanie Skinner’s, vision:
I wrote leave behind to answer the question: what happens when your future dies.

I feel there is a time right after a trauma when you’re left, fully on your own, to ease back into your life. For me, it was my unexpected divorce – and the time right after that I first experienced night terrors.

Happening the same time every night, it was a dark force sitting on my chest – leaving me unable to move. They happened so often I dreaded going to sleep. As time passed and I processed the loss – they stopped.

In leave behind, our heroine is just starting this process – and we never know if the entity is real or in her mind.
Lauren’s new house represents her current, fragile state. It’s bare with only a few hints of her past life but there is a sadness that permeates the space.
Her sadness.

The china cabinet represents the life she thought she would have – the hopes, the dreams of her life with her family that are now gone.

To shoot this – I’ve always seen stillness and quiet to be more frightening than anything we can come up in our minds. My vision for leave behind is to have a very slow pace – sitting with the actress – to convey that something in Lauren’s world is off.